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Its more seeing them frequently builds up familiarity which brings about curiosity. It's not like Kevin for example is a particularly deep character I personally have a connection with Kevin for getting me killed at the festival too many times -often when I forgot to account for him and got surprised with a situation I didnt have the stats for. So when I finally put in the effort to get down to the bottom of why he was like this I then made a commitment that wherever possible I'd spare the stats to keep Briony alive and marry him. 

I think LLTQ definitely did a better job of having the world feel like it reacted to your decisions in a way that the player can track. Marry Adair and face issues with Sedna. Hire your aunt and stop dealing with assassins. Etc. 

Here's it's like let the scientist go to Heru yes or no a disease starts. Clone children brought to your attention the different options produce different results I'm sure but tangibly you are working with percentages until someone dislikes you enough to send assassins more than you made a decision that leads to a natural consequence.

But seriously having scripted events involve the main cast more would go a long way into building that kind of dynamic where you feel invested in certain characters by familiarity and you felt like your decisions actually impact the wider cast in ways that seem like a natural consequence. 

There has to be a certain incentive to not playing economically and the right motivation is different for different players. I haven't really found my footing in playing like a military focused route if its even a thing (theres no obvious war/conquering event to be like yeah win a war and a bunch of people will swing their opinion and vote for you) but I suppose that would be on my lists of ways to try the game and see if new hooks come out with that style. 

Yes I could spend extra actions learning about characters but investigation feeds into the blackmail/alliance option- when the main way to play so far is getting votes theres a pressure to figure out whats necessary to secure the vote which means theres a pressure to not waste time investigating unless thats needed for the specific character. So I'm likely to land in a new region save game and figure out who are the easiest to get votes from how many social actions that takes and do that before leaving. Actually researching the character leads to situations where Im likely to think thats interesting but I quickly realise it takes much longer than I want to be here to actually get it done/ more stats than I have to pass so I reset and take the easier characters. And then the interesting quest/character gets lost in the sauce. 

As I optimised/experimented in LLTQ I took more opportunities to figure out what was up with the characters that showed up in several events or had been anecdotes in the flavourtext from the lessons. 

In this game when you are getting familiar and starting to optimise the clearest path for experimentation is figuring out what's going on with your lumen powers. You can glow or make things glow in different checks, you can figure out that you aren't what you thought you are via marriage which you'll be attempting to get votes. 

So the subplots and wider intrigue other than that is stuff you have to invest in without knowing what you'll be getting out of it. And when I've been playing I'm still so focused on optimising that I dont have say 3 actions to figure out a character is interesting. This is why I think the game needs to drip in character interactions or hints in spaces which aren't using what feels like a precious resource so that on subsequent playthroughs there's more of a desire to explore. 

Like how in LLTQ you could run into character interactions with the social turn like going to the dungeon to talk to Julianna or maybe just make more interactions in deep space where you have an abundance of free time